XRP's Pay-the-Hospital-Bill-Sale

The bad news: we had to take Joe to the ER for chest pains.
The good news: it wasn't a heart attack; his heart is fine.
The better news: XRP is having a big sale to cover the
hospital bill! All our books at XRPshop are 25% off,
including the last copies of MMS:WE and preorders for
Monster Geographica: Hill & Mountain (estimated shipping
date February 10). PDFs sold at ENworld game store are also
25% off. The sale lasts until the end of January.

A Brief Word From Leslie

A BRIEF WORD FROM LESLIE

Going to a GenCon or Origins has long been an unreachable
dream for many gamers, but it isn't necessary to save up and
wait any longer - chances are there is a gaming convention
in a city near you. These smaller conventions can be even
more fun than the granddaddies. They are a great way to
make new friends, try out new games, and possibly pick up
new players.

Races of the Dragon - Wizards of the Coast

A new D&D sourcebook for players and DMs that details races
descended from dragons. In addition to exploring the fan-
favorite kobold race, Races of the Dragon introduces two new
races, dragonborn and spellscales, and provides information
on half-dragons. The dragonborn are a transitive race, an
exciting new concept that allows players to transform from
their initial race into a new one. This book also includes a
wealth of cultural information and new prestige classes,
feats, equipment, spells, and magic items.

31 Questions To Define A Culture

31 Questions To Define A Culture

A guest article by Mike Bourke

I often compile a checklist of questions to be answered when
creating something new, be it a magic item, setting, or
society. The more exhaustive and complete this checklist is,
the better visualized and more complete the item in question
will be.

I recently had occasion to generate such a checklist for the
creation of a new, intelligent species, and thought it might
be useful to other people as well. In some ways, this
article is a companion to my previous one on Customizing
Common Races, though this one is going to focus more on
technique.

While it might not be necessary to write a response to each
checklist item, at the least its presence ensures you will
have thought about the subject matter. If you take the time
and trouble to write a short paragraph or two for each, at
the end of the process you will have a solid foundation for
play. Be warned, this can take a long time!

It's important not to be inventive and creative in response
to every question, else the resulting race/culture will be
too alien, hard to comprehend, and impossible to play. It's
better to craft a couple of unique points early on and
explore the ramifications and consequences of those points.

It's also helpful to use a known society as a basis; it will
become something unique once your creative ramifications
have made their impact felt. That's the function of Question
#1 - to explicitly state the key concepts and ideas that
will form the basis of the answers to the questions that
follow.

When using a checklist such as this, start by reading each
question and jotting down one- or two-word notes on any
points that are affected by the core concepts (ignoring the
last question). This gets your mind exploring the
ramifications. Self-discipline is important here because
it's too easy to start writing whole paragraphs or more to
discover you have run out of steam - or time - before you
get to the end. Try to spend no more than ten minutes on
this first pass in total.

A first pass acts as a warm-up exercise for the imagination.
Keep notes brief and simple. Once you've finished, take a 5
minute break. Next, run through the questions again, looking
for secondary impacts - the consequences and ramifications
of these brief answers on other aspects of the culture.
Again, skip the last question. As you look at each question,
glance through the list of answers given so far and ask,
"how is this subject affected by the answers already
decided?"

For example, if you started with three or four core ideas,
and generated a dozen one-word implications, that's roughly
15 things to think about for each question. With 30
questions to consider (you don't have to worry about the
first), this should take an hour or two.

Step three involves one more pass through the list of
questions looking for additional consequences. With luck,
you will now have 30-60 ideas and notes to work through.
Take a little more time on this final pass. Get all the
ideas down that occur to you, but move on after a few
seconds if none do. I allow an average of about 10 seconds
per item in this step, and that means that it will take
close to 4 hours to do the lot.

By the time you have finished, you should find overall
culture ideas have started to gel into a firm visualization.
Summarize, in two to ten sentences, the overall concept in
response to the last question.

Take a break. Then, explain and expand on the rest of the
one-word answers you've written in response to the other
questions. That might take a sentence, a paragraph, or even
a page or two, though the shorter the better. If you manage
5 questions a day, the whole thing will be done in a week.
If you can only do one or two at a time, it will take a
month. I would generally try to get this lot done in a day,
as keeping the schedule tight means that I don't have time
to get sidetracked into unnecessary detail.

Then comes the final stage - assembling all of this into a
useful format. You can either expand on what you have,
giving explanations, examples, and the like, or you can take
these notes and use them as described in the article on
Customizing Common Races, which contains additional thoughts
and considerations. For that matter, there is nothing to
stop you from retro analyzing the available source material
on a common race - boiling the information provided down
into single-sentence answers to each of these questions - to
get a summary of the existing materials for use in that
article.

Above all, have fun, because this is an awful lot of work to
do if you don't.

The Questions

What key concepts describe these people?

What is their genetic legacy and how does it affect
them?

For what tasks are they especially suited/unsuited?

How might they use their strengths?

How might they compensate for their shortcomings?

Where do they live? What is their primary habitat?

What are their homes like? How does the habitat affect
their dwellings and lifestyle?

What is their level of civil construction and what are
its characteristics?

What is daily life like?

What do they eat and drink? How do they react to other
foodstuffs?

How do they express themselves artistically? What are
their styles of music, sculpture, poetry, painting, plays?

Do they farm? If so, what? For what purposes? How is
food distributed?

What does a farm look like? How is a farm organised?

How do farms operate? What farming techniques do
they use?

What are their primary enemies, natural and cultural?

How do they defend against them?

What is their culture? Their government? Their politics?
Their economy?

What is their history? What's the real story, and what
is misunderstood or misremembered?

Who are their allies?

What are their dreams, goals, myths, legends?

What is their religion?

How does it affect their daily lives?

What crafts have they mastered? What special abilities
or knowledge do they have? How do these impact their
lives?

What is the criminal code and how are crimes punished?

How do they travel? Do they trade? With whom? For what?
Are they good or bad at it?

Do they use magic? What is their attitude to magic?

Do they use advanced technology? What is their attitude
to science?

How do they react to outsiders?

What weaponry do they use?

What are their personality archetypes? What are their
cultural blind spots? What are the unspoken absolute
beliefs that give society its foundation?

The Player's Guide to Eberron

The ultimate rules companion and gazetteer for Eberron
players! The Player's Guide to Eberron contains everything a
player needs to know about the Eberron campaign setting.
Presenting information in an innovative spread format, this
comprehensive gazetteer covers key topics a character should
know about, from Aerenal to Zilargo, house politics to the
Last War, dragons to the Lords of Dust, without revealing
information meant for Dungeon Masters only. New feats,
prestige classes, magic items, and spells are included in
the relevant entries.

Readers' Tips Of The Week:

1. Knights Of The King's Loyal Brigade

From: Michael J. Schmidt

(This is an entry from a game worlds contest held in
Roleplaying Tips Weekly, long, long ago.)

The King's Loyal Brigade is an elite troop of soldiers whose
sworn duty is to defend the King (and the royal family) at
all costs. Knights of the KLB are assigned as bodyguards
inside and outside the kingdom. They are also responsible
for arranging palace security, and for security whenever
the royal family is visiting a city or town.

The KLB also acts as the highest policing authority in the
realm and have powers of arrest. In times of peace, they
keep watch over citizens (and make sure there is no unrest
brewing), and in times of war they ride into battle with the
King. The KLB are also sometimes sent to regions in the
kingdom that require help and whose own militias are
incapable of handling a situation.

Members of the KLB are selected from the ranks of the armed
forces who have come to the attention of their commanding
officers, or are regular citizens who have been noticed by
the KLB and drafted for their exceptional abilities.

Every KLB member receives a knighthood and the noble title
of Sir or Dame. They are expected to follow a strict code of
honor, much like a paladin. Sometimes, they are required to
rule over a small area of land in a region as directed by
the King, and sometimes upon retirement a knight of the KLB
is granted permanent lands and an increase in noble title.

A knight of the King's Loyal Brigade is usually garbed in
full plate armor of shining steel decorated with gold trim
and the brigade's coat of arms. Each is trained to use a
bastard sword one handed so they can use a shining shield on
the other arm. Knights who have been assigned as bodyguards
usually dress in clothes similar to other members of the
noble court to blend in, but fully armored knights are never
far away.

Knights of the King's Loyal Brigade are devoted to the royal
family, and would give their lives in an instant in defense
of the realm. Their work is demanding, with no room for
error, so the requirements to become a member are rigid and
high.

Roleplaying Idea:

One or more of the PCs are drafted into the King's Loyal
Brigade and sent to restore order in a lawless border town
as a test of their abilities. When they arrive, however,
things aren't as they seem. Their superiors believe the
lawlessness might be self-defence against the machinations
of a merchant attempting to control all trade to the
neighbouring country. Can the PCs restore order, provide
justice for the town, and stop the merchant without falling
foul of the King, their superiors, and the code of conduct?

Number of Members: Fluctuates. Drops rapidly until there is
a supernatural encounter near a major university, or in
Berkeley CA.

Nature of Members: Fluffy headed people who feel that
monsters are an ecological response to the depredations of
humanity, and a natural control for humanity's over-
population. Sentimental people who feel that, just because a
creature wants to suck out your insides and wear your skin
for a disguise, this doesn't mean he doesn't have feelings,
too.

Organization: Loose cells, organized by local enthusiasts,
often quickly exterminated.

Game Role: To make your players spit things all over the
table, to make ruthless fun of "people for the ethical
treatment of animals," or other people who see humanity as a
blight and wear Birkenstocks.

World Role: McVictims.

Relative Influence: Slight, although they can get into
delicate situations and make them worse/stupider/weirder.

Public or Secret? Public until members of B13/The
Initiative/Delta Green/Department Seven/various Scoobies get
a hold of them.

Publicly Stated Goal: To ensure that vampires, werewolves,
demons, face-huggers, brain-eaters, bone-suckers, and
everything else nasty and brutal is treated fairly by
society and gets its day in court.

Relative Wealth: Not much. Often, members eschew materialism
and capitalism.

Group Advantages: Earnest belief in silly things.

Contacts: Very often a cell of this organization will crop
up after a potential member (probably already a PETA
supporter) encounters the supernatural. In this case, he may
already be in proximity to agents of B13/The
Initiative/Delta Green/Department Seven/various Scoobies.

Special Abilities: Members of this group can rationalize the
most fatuous, slap happy, and self destructive ideas, and
act on them sincerely.

Group Disadvantages: McVictims!

Special Disadvantages: They tend to pursue monsters that see
them as food to try and explain their cause. Many monsters
take this as a request to be eaten.

Who Belongs: People who believe humanity is too numerous,
arrogant, and inherently destructive, and that horrifying
creatures provide a valid ecological balancing mechanism.

Who Doesn't Belong: People who value human life.

Those Who Favor Them: Monsters (incredulous, but
supportive), PETA.

Public Face: Clueless hippies and ultra liberals somewhere
past the bounds of sanity.

History of the Group: First started in 1983, when members of
a PETA organization were attacked by a vampire and then
saved. Realizing the implications, the original members of
the organization researched monsters and such, and soon
formed Pet - 'Em. Not long afterwards, they were all eaten
by vampires.

Apparently, despite all efforts, their notes and writings
keep turning up. (Agents suspect that vampires with nasty
senses of humor preserve them and reintroduce them to
vulnerable groups.)

3. Tracking Consumable Items

One of my players recently came up with a neat idea to
squash the temptation and simplify equipment use. Every time
a player gets a consumable magic item (potion, scroll, etc.)
the DM hands out a small square of paper with the item's
name and details on (dice to roll, duration, etc.). To use
it, the player hands it to the DM, who rolls effect dice and
bins the chit.

This ensures the DM is fully aware of the item's use, and
makes sure items are removed from equipment lists and
adjudicated fairly.

We also use pre-printed A6 'note' sheets for in-game
tracking of:

Hit points

Willpower points

Lost missiles used

Luck re-rolls used

Karma points spent

Here's an example Excel file I print out for tracking
purposes. I often print/photocopy this sort of stuff on the
back of scrap paper just to keep the recycling conscience
gremlins and paper costs down to a muffled roar.

4. My Rolemaster Game

From: John Scanlon

Hi Johnn! I started GMing about a year ago when I was
trying to get a group together, and everybody else had less
(often no) experience even playing. So, I became the
de facto GM. As I had problems getting started (your
newsletter has definitely helped with those!), I thought I
would write in my own experiences in case anyone else is in
a similar boat.

Starting a Group

I played a fair amount in university and after with the same
group of people, but when I wanted to get back into it, none
of them wanted or had the time to play. However, I got some
advice on how to start a campaign and run it successfully
from the two great GMs I had. (Oh yeah, if anyone from FOW
is here, read no further! Spoilers are ahead!) I wanted to
play, and didn't know who to play with. Few of my friends
wanted to commit to a weekly game without knowing more about
it, so I decided to set up the campaign in a way that people
could try it out if they wanted, but so that they didn't
have to be there every week.

One of the ways I did this by giving them a fair amount of
leeway in their characters. The only real guideline I made
was they all had to be devout members of the Church of
Justice and Righteous Anger. So, basically, they're a set of
papal assassins. This way, as I explained it to them, they
would have the same character week after week, and would get
all the benefits of playing their character through
different levels, but if they couldn't play for a week or
two, I would just design the next mission to ensure their
character's attributes weren't needed as much.

With this in effect, people were more willing to sign on. I
got a group of six people who were willing to play fairly
regularly, along with a few others who wanted to fill in
occasionally. The players were under the belief that they
were just going to play a series of totally unrelated
missions.

The system I chose was Rolemaster. Although it is
fairly complex (meaning number-intensive), I quite like the
realism of it. Rolemaster has three kinds of magic:

Channeling, which comes through the gods

Essence, which inhabits all of nature

Mentalism

I told my PCs they were not allowed to use either Essence or
Mentalism as I was trying to make it easier on me as a
novice GM. However, the real reason was that I had an over-
riding story they weren't privy to: Essence was coming back
into the world, and being religious followers, the PCs would
be against it.

The Original Setup

With Rolemaster, character development can take a long time,
and I wanted to make sure that my players went through the
whole process of developing actual characters, as opposed to
shallow versions. Each person spent about eight hours on
just developing their first level characters. On the first
night of playing, I had everyone bring two copies of their
character, supposedly so that we could each have a copy.

The way I set it up was that two days a year (the equinoxes)
people could enter the Church from wherever they were in the
land. With a Church of this nature, there are many different
roles to fulfill, such as guards, priests, servants, lictors
(law-givers), and the justicars (law-enforcers). Rumours
also claim a secret society, the Fist of Wrath, also exists,
whose members are papal assassins sent out on missions to
deal with evils so heinous the average person shouldn't know
of them. However, such rumours are usually mocked, and those
who do speak of it are soon found in less than perfect
health.

On these two holy days, after a night of purification, all
of the supplicants throughout the land gather at their
nearest Church, where they await their turn to be called
forth. When called, they answer a few questions and then
step forward into the Eternal Flame. If they are of pure
heart and worthy of serving Theon, they are unharmed and the
fire blazes around them in the colour of the different roles
(red for priests, white for Lictors, black for justicars,
blue for servants, and green for guards), which decides
their calling. However, if they are unworthy of the honour
of serving Theon, then the flames swirl around them and they
die a painful, horrible death.

After spending hours on creating characters (often for the
first time, as some had never played a roleplaying game),
the players sent their characters to local temples (they
were all scattered across the country, so none of them knew
each other). I took each player aside and went through the
ceremony. I then rolled the dice for effect, but hid the
results (which were meaningless anyway). I acted shocked,
upset, and unsure what to do.

I said, "You can see the flames around you - a bit of blue
to your left, some black straight ahead, some green swirling
into white to the right, and you start to feel the pain,
which gets worse and worse. You scream as you feel the flesh
melt off your bones until everything goes mercifully black!"
I ripped up their character sheet about six times in front
of them, gave a half-apologetic shrug, and asked them not to
say anything to the others as I took each aside.

Each player was convinced they had spent all that time
creating a character, only to have him killed before
anything happened. Naturally, the characters woke up in a
temple far from where they had started, and were told that
they were going to be members of the Fist of Wrath. Their
characters had to die to the world at large, as they had to
leave their old life behind to properly serve Theon.

Anyway, aside from making a great story for all of us, this
start focused everyone's attention on the game, and made
them even closer to their characters.

Overall Game Plan

As previously mentioned, I had secretly come up with the
overall game plan for the campaign at large, although they
were all convinced it was a bunch of individual missions
that were totally unconnected to each other (although I did
give some secrets to different members at different times).

For Essence to properly return, six pieces of a statue had
to be put back together. The six pieces represented fire,
earth, water, spirit, air, and organic. Their missions,
interspersed with Dukes of Hazzard episodes (those that are
brainless and fairly formulaic, but fun) involved gathering
these pieces and bringing them back to the temple where one
of the members is secretly trying to overthrow the power the
gods have over the world.

We're now just over halfway through the campaign, and the
PCs are only starting to realize that it is actually a
connected story. (About three episodes ago, I was both
insulted and secretly pleased at the same time. The players
were starting to piece things together. They questioned the
idea that everything was unconnected, and started putting
together a few of the randomly scattered bits of information
that had been put out there, and one of them said something
like, "It can't be all that connected! John isn't that
smart!" Needless to say, revenge is a dish best served
cold...)

Why It Worked

The players really enjoy it, I have a bit of a lineup of
people wanting to play now, and I'm the one that gets in
trouble when I can't play as regularly as the players want.
I have a bunch of people who were originally hesitant to
play that now want to, and I credit all this to a few
things:

Setting it up so that players felt able to play around
their schedules.

Setting it up with a well-thought out backstory, but not
letting them know there was one.

Getting them invested in their characters right off the
bat, in a dramatic, unforgettable, and unorthodox manner.

Oh yeah! If anyone did read this who shouldn't have (meaning
my players), let me know, as I already know how I can work
it into the story!

It's a dice roller that saves your results in a database so
you can still use dice rolls when playing long distance
games. It rolls any kind of dice you could possibly want,
and it allows you to make sure all rolls are correct and
legal. Thanks, and much continued success to Roleplayingtips.com!

7. Party Name Ideas

From: Jeff Wilder

In the Forgotten Realms, while investigating an orc-mind
flayer slavery ring, we stumbled upon an isolated valley and
ended up battling a Tyrannosaurus Rex...at 4th-level!

Despite two of our number being swallowed, we (barely)
emerged victorious. My dwarven cleric and crafter suggested
the ranger get what hide he could from the beast. At the
next village, my dwarf crafted masterwork boots out of T-Rex
hide for the six of us, and suggested we call ourselves the
Scaled Company.

From: Edge

The Strangers

From: Fred Eberron

We are playing an over-the-top Eberron game. To serve this
purpose and to make sure I was free in sending the
characters wherever I wanted, I had a relic seeker called
The Boss hire them. The Boss is eccentric, so it was easy to
give the party a cheesy name.

Before giving away the name, I must say that I'm a big GI
Joe fan, and that I wanted the game to reflect the kind of
actions and plots \we saw in GI Joe, especially the comics
by Devil's Due. Over-the-top action, a bit of spying, strong
villains, deceptive allies; that's what I wanted for this
game.

Inspired by the new GI Joe animated series (Sigma 6), I named
the team Stygma-6. At that time we had six players, so the 6
fitted well with the name and the Stygma is cheesy enough
for my taste (and I can always tie it to a plot later on).
It took a few games for the name to be accepted, but using
it in e-mails and during the game, it became natural.

Now, the team even has a cool 3D logo, and one of the
players, a warforged fighter called BruteEnFer (IronBrute),
was even renamed Adam Stygma to be able to add a new player
to the game while keeping the 6. So the team's name is now
Adam Stygma's Six and almost has the Ocean's 11 feeling....

From: Arthur

The name that stands out most in my mind was a party set in
Ravens Bluff (Forgotten Realms). The opening module
assembled the PCs and a room full of NPCs to sign up for
night patrol in the city. All of the characters and NPCs
were down on their luck and in need of coin. The module
called for all in attendance to draw a colored disc from a
bag. All of those who drew the same color were one team. All
of the PCs drew blue discs. This is a heck of an improvement
over the "you all meet in a tavern" start.

After a couple of adventures, they started referring to
themselves as Group Azure. The name stuck for the rest of
the campaign.

Monte Cook Presents: Iron Heroes Bestiary

This bestiary contains two dozen new monsters that fill a
variety of roles, from intelligent, thinking foes to brutal,
mindless beasts that spread misery and destruction. What
they all have in common is a mixture of martial and arcane
power to challenge player characters. Introducing 24 new
creatures for your campaign, along with basic advice on
using monsters in Iron Heroes. Features mathematical methods
for judging whether a creature offers the proper threat to
the party, plus new feats designed to work with monster
abilities.

The Iron Heroes Bestiary also presents several new villain
classes, an innovative concept introduced in Mastering Iron
Heroes. Villain classes are a useful tool for generating
challenging NPC villains or opponents for the PCs with a
minimum of work. Compatible with Iron Heroes and any game
that uses d20-based mechanics.